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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Outsource Training to Customers

The Business of Learning (see Free Online Conference – Future of Learning with Recordings Here) event went really well. One of the really interesting ideas came from Allessandria Polizzi who is Group Manager for Accountant Training & Relations at Intuit. Her role is to make sure that accountants are trained on the Quickbook products.

You can see Allessandria at 21:30 of the following video:


If you have problem seeing the video you can view them here as well.

Intuit used to produce the content themselves, but they have transitioned to hiring their Accountants (their customers) to produce the training content for them. This includes a varied mix of solutions - webinars, seminars, self-paced eLearning. One of the examples of how they did this was to give the Accountants camcorders and software (along with training) so that they could produce small training pieces. One example that she mentions is a video piece on mobile access showing how they can access client information from the beach via a mobile device.

There are 100 accountants who produce training for them as compared to 12 in her organization. These accountants are experts in using their software. They add legitimacy to the content. Many of these accountants already provided training to their end customers, so providing training to other accountants was an easy extension.

It's an interesting idea and something that can be applied in many other domains. While this is similar to having SMEs produce the content - I think that Intuit takes it a bit further with how they are engaging and paying them. They also audition/test their customers. They spread the work pretty wide.

4 comments:

Compassioninpolitics said...

Interesting example of crowd sourcing education and training.

I'm curious if Blackboard or universities will eventually move in this direction.

I'm glad they are paying the people (or at least compensating) doing the work, I think that inspires a better relationship (reciprocity) and perhaps a level of quality.

Harold Jarche said...

I can only see part of the media player, the rest is obscured by the nav bars on the right. Using Firefox.

Tony Karrer said...

You can view the videos here:

http://learntrends.ning.com/page/july-2009-videos-for-future-of

as well. It works for me on Firefox, but it does run across the right column.

Tony Karrer said...

@Compassion - I wonder what you call this. It's a different kind of crowdsourcing in that they are really acting more like outsourcing (choosing a few, paying them, etc.). But it's like crowdsourcing in that it's to the customers.

Maybe an opportunity for a term.